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Firefox’s biggest priority: rounding corners (arstechnica.com)

submitted 4 days ago by rhamph@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Mozilla once again notices that, in spite of the lavish salaries they heap upon their techbro executives, Firefox’s userbase continues to dwindle. Could this be because they don’t operate a monolithic surveillance advertising racket? Or maybe it’s because the corners in the UI aren’t round enough.

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/whatsnew/157/

Choice quote from that interview, which was important enough to get a big box in the release notes too:

We are bringing back compact mode as well

We removed it for absolutely no goddamn fucking reason, despite numerous objections, and now we’re bringing it back! This is called ‘listening’, you see. We are very dependable can definitely be relied upon to provide a stable browser that you won’t have to worry about.

Somehow those executives just can’t work out that unless you can advertise Firefox in all of the search engines and youtubes and gmails and docs and drives and whatever the fuck and preinstall it on all the phones, the Chrome users will not come. “Ooh shiny” is the least of anyone’s concerns.

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[–] WolvenSpectre@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Opera 12 started to do this. China owns it now and it is based on Chromium. A couple of Open Source browsers did it for the same reason later and lost users like their was orbital bombardment hitting their project. Grab a brain... it is not the design language that makes Chrome so successful and if you look and act like them, well users are just going to use them.

[–] daemonspudguy@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Your chain of causality is comically nonsensical. First of all, Opera isn't owned "by China," it's a publicly traded company whose largest shareholder happens to be Chinese. The company's still Norwegian. Second of all, that didn't happen until 2016. Opera Software ASA (now Otello ASA) are the ones who switched to Chromium 3 years before that because they had decided that Presto couldn't compete with WebKit anymore. I disagree with that decision but that's what happened.

[–] WolvenSpectre@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

OK, I was tired and over-simplified. I shop with Chinese Companies and I usually defend them when they are receiving Anti Sino hate and call them to task when they pull BS, so that was beneath me and not what I was saying. As a Opera user at the time I know it is a multinational group that is only mostly Chinese Investors. I also know some Chinese based business tactics that they tried to pull on users early on and got enough blowback that they stopped doing it.

The Company went to hell as soon as Jon Von Techner left the CEO roll and they brought in that "Adult" CEO and he started the Chromium rewrite, attacking community members like me, shutting out Jon until he had to leave, openly bragged about making the company more like Google Chrome so that Google would buy out Opera ASA for the patents and he would get his golden parachute(I know that that is when CEO's are fired or the company fails, but that is how he worded it). Then when Google turned their nose up their secondary job was to find ANYBODY to buy the browser and patents. That is when they sold to the mostly Chinese Company who I could not be arsed to look up because I was off of Opera and on to Vivaldi by then not knowing initially that that was Jon's Company, IIRC. The also killed OperaMail which I used for years after even though it was left on the vine to rot and was the inspiration for the modern Thunderbird UI design.

[–] ebu@awful.systems 3 points 4 days ago

i, too, dislike it when things are owned by the evil scary China instead of good and righteous Norway